Sight and Sound

Narratively speaking, nothing much happens in Iranian director Majid Majidi's The Color of Paradise (1999). A greasy widower, hair matted crustily to the sides of his head, tries to abandon his son, Mohammad, at a school for the blind. When the school's directors refuse, the boy and his father travel to one of Iran's lush mountain outposts, where the family's matriarch, known simply as Granny, tends a plot of land and cares for Mohammad's two sisters. Later, Mohammad will apprentice with a blind carpenter and fall into a rushing stream.

Such simplicity, however, can be deceiving — the film pushes the viewer into the realm of the miraculous, imbuing the clack of a woodpecker or the swaying stalks of wildflowers with an almost spiritual meaning.

Mohammad, earnest and joyful, hears the repetitive code of Braille in the whistling calls of birds, in the voice of nature communicating through oblique combinations of letters and numbers; despite his inability to see, he submerges himself in the world, in the possibilities of seeing with ears and hands and nose.

The film's heightened sense of sound, the brief pulses of noise that recur throughout, convey Mohammad's aural sensitivity so that the viewer, too, experiences the world through Mohammad's perspective. Sound — amplified, dampened, articulated lovingly if ever so briefly — marks the lively and celebratory, or, conversely, the dimming hopes of a family sliding gently into ruin.

Arriving in his grandmother's village, tucked into the vernal hillside as though snuggling up for comfort and warmth, Mohammad's gleeful calls of "Granny! Granny!" resound with the innocent, uncomplicated love of a child, with a faith that all will be well.

The whispering grass of Granny's alfalfa plot conjures a quiet chuckle of content, while her flutish voice playfully acknowledges the benefits of a young spirit. The unadulterated joy of watching Mohammad and Granny clasp hands reaffirms, if only for a spell, a belief in the strength of familial ties.

Angry with her for obeying his father's wishes that he not be sent to the local school, Mohammad sulks and evades her embrace. Her eyes well up, her face falls, and she says to him, her voice ever so slightly stiffer, deeper, "I would die for you."

Such love overwhelms; one cannot help but feel her tenuous touch, or sense the warm air of her voice. The film attempts to portray, maybe too hopefully, a world in which the weakest members — the blind, the infirm, the persecuted — are not necessarily destined to suffer the hatred they have, in recent times, suffered so often.

By the end of the film, though, shifts of tone, color and sound reflect darkening horizons and weakening constitutions.

In contemporary Iran, as in postwar Germany, Italy and Japan, the wounds created by time, by the terrors of history, require years to sew shut, to scab over and to heal. Even then, the greatest blemishes and blunders, the most frightening scars, may last lifetimes.

In The Color of Paradise, paradise, in all its beautiful shades is lost. Sun gives way to gray skies, while bright flowers are relinquished for dullish wood and the black soot of never-ending fires. And the call of birds floats slowly away, replaced by the industrial hum of a power saw or the infrequent whine of a duck.

When a bridge breaks and Mohammad falls into rock-strewn rapids, his father (after pausing a moment in what is either relief or shock, and possibly both) jumps in after him. The camera begins to take on his perspective, disorienting the viewer with the bubbling fierceness of nature's wrath, muffling the sounds on which we have thus far relied.

The quiet, searching denouement which follows is devastating, somehow unspeakable, shaking the very fabric of the humanistic faith which runs throughout the middle portion of the film.

To fill the great void left in my heart by the film's end, I immediately began to watch it again, taking pleasure once more in the barely hidden verbiage of colors and sounds which infuses Mohammad's visit with Granny.

The experience confirmed for me, if nothing else, that the strength of emotions galvanized by film remains unparalleled, and that this medium, starting in some cases to show its age, is still worth a hell of a lot.

sex, lies and dirty dancing

"Everyone's blessed with one special thing," 17-year old Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) says to his girlfriend early in Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997). His "special thing," which he uses to escape the dank, sorrowful confines of his Torrance, Calif., home, is his penis.

Set in the San Fernando Valley in 1977, Boogie Nights is a film about disco and debauchery on the pornography scene, where Eddie, who quickly assumes the nom de porn Dirk Diggler — a name that suggests phalluses and, with its crusty alliteration, Eddie's startling immaturity — rises to stardom by way of his massive, um, manhood.

But for someone who jacks off for gay men in the back room of a night club for a measly $10, Eddie is about as unworldly as they come. He cringes at the first sip of tequila at a party; he tiptoes around costar Amber Waves (the amazing Julianne Moore), asking her if it's alright to make their first onscreen fuck "sexy." "Look at this jackknife," he yells to his buddy Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) as he leaps off the diving board: this is a teenager with little sense of what he's getting into, and none of the wherewithal to get out.

In some ways, though, Eddie's story plays second fiddle to Anderson's lovingly crafted 1970s California. With an almost obsessive attention to detail, he gets the seediness of disco culture (at least as Hollywood sees it) exactly right: the painkillers spilled onto the tacky oak nightstand, the bad coke passed around at parties, the grotesque colors that call to mind overripe fruit.

Everything, even porn king Jack Horner's spacious ranch house, looks tired, as though the entire culture were settling down to die. Amid the Altmanesque chaos of Anderson's sprawling cast and virtuosic tracking shots — including the opening of the film, a three-minute shot that introduces the characters as they prowl the dim corners of their favorite club, Hot Traxx — there's a sense of breakdown and decay.

Mascara runs, noses bleed, smoke gets in the eyes. There's something off here, something hard to place, something that resembles misery but won't quite admit to it.

That's because the genius of the film is not in its overdose of classic songs, its garish hues or its aimlessly hedonistic atmosphere, but in its deeply wrought sadness. The characters lose sons to divorce, find their wives fucking other men and don't attempt to stop it, endure moments of bitter drunkenness and cowardly silence.

The dissonance between the way things are supposed to be and the way things are is, for these marginal players in the Hollywood game, an irreconcilable break in the flow of happiness. With unlimited sex, money and drugs, how could you not have fun?

The explicitness of the film is, however, not exciting but enervating: decisions of where to come and what position to take have the stultifying banality of bookkeeping or stenography. Porn is work, and the repetition of a familiar task, as in any profession, just seems like more time down the drain.

What Anderson says with this mixture of eroticism and boredom is something about film itself — Boogie Nights, at its heart, is not about sex or the '70s but about the satisfaction derived from watching rather than creating. Despite Jack Horner's dream "to make a film that is true, and right, and dramatic," cinema, for the maker, is about narrative spinning out of control, about the margins upsetting the center of the action. It's about everything caught between the frames, about the long takes that capture the endless variety — the endlessness, period — of this unfathomable culture in which we live.

But film for the viewer, in its integral voyeurism, is really just pornography sanctified: It's about climax, about conclusion, about getting off.

For my take on Paul Thomas Anderson and his film There Will Be Blood, check out my piece in Bright Lights Film Journal.